The Road That Made America: A Modern Pilgrim's Journey on the Great Wagon Road [Hardcover]

In the bestselling tradition of Rinker Buck’sThe Oregon Trailand Tony Horwitz’sConfederates in the Attic,The Road That Made Americais a lively, epic account of one of the greatest untold stories in our nation’s history—the eight-hundred-mile long Great Wagon Road that 18th-century American settlers forged from Philadelphia to Georgia, which expanded the country dramatically in the decades before we ventured west.

Little known today, the Great Wagon Road was the primary road of frontier America: a mass migration route that stretched more than eight hundred miles from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia. It opened the Southern frontier and wilderness east of the Appalachian Mountains to America’s first settlers, and later served as the gateway for the exploration of the American West. In the mid-1700s, waves of European colonists in search of land for new homes left Pennsylvania to settle in the colonial backcountry of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. More than one hundred thousand settlers made the arduous trek, those who would become the foundational generations of the world’s first true immigrant nation. In their newly formed village squares, democracy took root and bloomed. During the Revolutionary War, the road served as the key supply line to the American resistance in the western areas of the colonies, especially in the South.

Drawing on years of fieldwork and scholarship by an army of archeologists, academics, archivists, preservationists, and passionate history lovers, James Dodson sets out to follow the road’s original path from Philadelphia to Georgia. On his journey, he crosses six contiguous states and some of the most historic and hallowed landscapes of eastern America, touching many of the nation’s most sacred battlefields and burying grounds. Due to its strategic importance, military engagements were staged along the Great Wagon Road througló‹